The Combined Olympic and World Medal Rankings – Detailed

As part of our Research Files, here’s a ranked list of every single gymnast who has won an Olympic or worlds medal from the very first WAG competitions in 1928 up to the present day. This list is our more in-depth chart that includes every medal in detail, but if you’re looking for something simpler, you can check out the basic list instead.

In those instances where more than one athlete has the same number of total medals, the first tiebreaker is the number of gold medals, then the number of silver medals. Where two or more athletes have exactly the same number of gold, silver and bronze medals, the ranking is shown as a tie and the athletes are shown in alphabetical order.

I’m sorry but I can’t see the meaning of those lists … In my opinion, it’s a lot of work for a very low interest. These rankings mean nothing : first, it’s a nonsense to compare Latynina with Biles ; second, “average” gymnasts (like Sacramone”) are on the top of the ranking, and incredible gymnasts (Podlopayeva, Yurchenko) are on the bottom …

Additionally, I use the data from these lists to bring up facts and analysis in OTHER posts that you see all year long, e.g. saying so and so is this country’s first medalist since 1962 or this is so and so’s 20th world medal.

Scrolling thru this I again remembered that somehow Madison Kocian was the 2nd most decorated American gymnast of last quad. Still boggles my damn mind that she and her coaches were able to pull that off despite so many setbacks. Makes you wonder what she could have done if healthy all that time!

If she had been healthy all that time I’m not sure if it would’ve made much of a difference. In 2013, had she not rolled her ankle at nationals I think she surely would’ve gone to worlds since she was a perfect balance to Maroney as a specialist, but I don’t think she was a medal contender at that point in time anyway. 2014 and 2015 were the years where she remained mostly healthy, and went to worlds both years, results reflected in her medal count. In 2016 she had gotten a stress fracture (or something) and was planning to perform an Amanar and upgrade Beam. However I think the Amanar was a pipe dream and even if she did perform the upgraded Beam that she wanted to do, it still wouldn’t have held up against Raisman, Biles it Hernandez and I think they would’ve thrown Douglas up on Beam anyway. I also remember Kocian saying that her injury was a blessing in disguise because it forced her to rest her body while she still could before the olympics. I’m not saying it’s not impressive that she achieved so much, because she did persevere through a lot to get to where she was, I just don’t think it would’ve affected her medal count either way.

I just think it’s wild that Simone accomplished so much in such a short period of time. Gina Gogean only has one more medal than her overall but she competed in two Olympics and five world championships across 6 years. Gymnastics is so much more competitive now, too, so for her to be as dominant as she has been during THIS period in the sport is pretty crazy. People can say what they want about her style or her winning so much, but I just think that as a fan, it’s a privilege to be able to watch it all happening in real time. Regardless of whatever, she’s a legend. I’d say the same for Aliya Mustafina, too. We’ve been lucky to watch her achieve greatness as well. Really hoping she can keep being amazing and Simone can break some more records and they both move further up the list in the next few years.

Could you do a list without Team Medals at one point? It would be interesting to see the personal results, because I think it shows the personal level of gymnastics way better. People from countries where the Gymnastics Program is not that strong are a little bit held under in such lists because they will never have as many medals as other people who went x times to worlds and only got away with team medals. Also at some worlds there are no team competitions so that’s also a natural disadvantage for some gymnasts.
But I immensely appreciate the huge amount of effort you put into these Posts!

Yup! I know, when I was going through those with three or fewer medals, it was like team team team team team team team team, Lauren Mitchell, team team team team team team team team team team team Pauline Schäfer…these are their “official” medal counts so I wanted to do the “official” list and ranking but I have plans in the works to make lists for individual medals only and to separate them by country so you can see it kind of spread out that way too.

People might want to keep in mind that in some time periods, world championships were only held every two years, and in some time periods, they were held every year. So, side by side comparisons of total numbers of medals are a bit of comparing apples and oranges. I’m not saying you shouldn’t make the list, as in fact it is interesting to look through. I just think your younger readers might not realize that in the past, there were less world championships.

Yup, I made that point elsewhere on the list that only included world championships. I think I said something along the lines of imagine how many world titles Larisa Latynina would’ve had if worlds were held annually in her day rather than every four years.

She also had at least one child during her competitive career, something that was only made possible by the length of time between world championships.
I think the things that are even more remarkable is winning so many medals when there was no “new life” and when there were compulsories to learn.